After the recent announcement about Six Apart, some of you might have been wondering about the future of Movable Type. We can be very clear about that: of course we will continue development and support of this platform that now has a decade of history behind it.
- Movable Type 4 remains rock-solid blogging software for all uses.
- Movable Type 5 is a new step up for managing multiple sites.
- Melody is driven by the most enthusiastic community of bleeding-edge developers.
All this software shares the same root: Movable Type, the publishing platform.
Movable Type 5.1 is in the final development phase, we are anticipating a Beta release this winter. We are also planning another 4.x release to keep this mature branch up to date.
All these developments are open to the public. You can check our daily activities on FogBugz and in our code repositories. And just like every open source project, we appreciate your help to make Movable Type (even) Better !
Darnell Clayton on September 24, 2010, 7:10 p.m. Reply
That’s great to hear, but MT needs more than words to convince the community (and those outside of it) that it’s still a viable option.
Example: Ever since Six Apart pioneered mobile blogging on the iPhone, there has been little innovation on the iFront (or even the Blackberry).
Meanwhile WordPress, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Squarespace and Posterous are quickly improving their mobile apps (some of them are now including video uploading).
Mobile is where its at right now, and if you want to know why my friends are choosing WordPress, et al over MT, etc. its because they are pumping out apps upon every device (convincing users to defect).
There are probably a zillion other areas where MT can improve, but if I were you I’d start with the mobile world and move on from there.
Derek K. Miller on September 25, 2010, 11:16 p.m. Reply
Jun, thank you for the basic reassurance early on. Darnell, however, is quite right. The lack of dedicated, up-to-date Movable Type mobile blogging apps is a shame. I’m not a programmer, so I can’t personally help to create any, but it’s noticeable.
Funny that, after almost a decade using Blogger, I chose this year to switch to Movable Type. I don’t regret the decision, but now I care more about this change than I would have earlier. I hope it works out. There has been very little mention of that venerable software in this discussion, but for various reasons I need to maintain an installation on my own server, and MT best meets my needs now.
I was pleased to see a 5.03 update (minor as it is), but I also don’t see how well a personal blogger running MT fits into the new Say Media strategy. Then again, it was hard to see how it fit into Six Apart recently, even if it was how the company started. I’ll remain optimistic, plan to continue using Movable Type, and keep my options open. But I’d like to hear something from Say Media (on THEIR website, not here, and at MovableType.com, where even the post about the new company didn’t mention MT itself!) about plans for the product.
Derek K. Miller on September 25, 2010, 11:23 p.m. Reply
I’ve posted some longer discussion over at my blog, focused on Movable Type (since that’s what I run), but also talking about this acquisition more generally:
http://www.penmachine.com/2010/09/six-apart-say-media-movable-type
Jun Kaneko on September 27, 2010, 3:03 a.m. Reply
Darnell and Derek,
Thank you for your comments ! I agree that the mobile support is getting more important. In fact, there are several plugins and themes to add mobile functionality to Movable Type. Probably it would be better to introduce those solutions in one place, and also improve MT’s core capability in the future release. I added it to the feature request page. Surely, this kind of user feedback is a key driver of Movable Type !
http://bugs.movabletype.org/default.asp?W5
Darnell Clayton on September 27, 2010, 11:11 a.m. Reply
Hey Jun,
When referring to mobile I am not talking about themes, plugins, web apps etc.
I’m talking about downloadable programs upon the iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices (native apps).
Currently WordPress, Tumblr, LiveJournal and Squarespace are leading the way as far as native iPhone apps go, with the former 2 battling it out upon all 3 major mobile platforms (Blackberry, Android and iOS).
Being that you guys have a rich history, Movable Type should be among those with an official native app, and one that is innovative at that.
Your lack of presence is convincing people to defect towards Tumblr or WordPress (which means one less customer for Say Media).
Dave Aiello on September 28, 2010, 11:24 a.m. Reply
Darnell:
Your comment that Six Apart has no presence in the native mobile app market isn’t true.
The blogging tools you cite in your last comment are provisioned exclusively or primarily as Software-As-A-Service (SAAS). Six Apart’s flagship SAAS blogging platform, TypePad, has an iOS application: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/typepad/id281944480?mt=8.
You are asking us to build a native mobile application for Movable Type, a totally self-hosted web publishing tool. Six Apart could do this, but it probably wouldn’t have the same functionality as at least three of the four apps that you suggest that we emulate.
Derek K. Miller on September 28, 2010, 3:13 p.m. Reply
Nevertheless, there is a formal WordPress app, which helps mobile bloggers publish to self-hosted blogs a la Movable Type. Yes, there are iOS apps that use MetaWeblogAPI or whatever to be able to publish to MT, but an app “blessed” by MT’s developers and tailored to the way MT works would be helpful, even if it’s actually built elsewhere.
As for something MT really needs as a self-hosted piece of software, some kind of automated upgrade is near the top of my list. Self-hosted WordPress installs have offered it via a plugin for a few years, and as built-in functionality in recent versions. I recently upgraded MT 5.02 to 5.03, and the process of uploading, unzipping, changing file permissions, moving over plugins, etc. really feels pretty backward compared to the one-click process WordPress now offers, even for major version updates.
This probably isn’t the right forum for this discussion anyway, but there you go.
derek johnson on June 26, 2012, 11:26 p.m. Reply
Can’t wait for MT 5! So excited to start managing multiple websites!
Lorinda on July 30, 2012, 11:18 a.m. Reply
I am sure about that. The last 5 years since I follow Moveable Type have shown that this is one of the best IT community a man can find. Keep going with the good work.